#370

Reflecting on the origins of this blog: a way to strengthen the case for purchasing one of the texts I was putting out on kindle direct publishing, something that receded quickly in importance, surfacing occasionally and even recently with the completion of The Tetrahedron, but which I have decidedly abandoned in the interim. It has never helped me sell so much as single copy of any book, which is lucky because the books as objects are not that great. I made a lot of mistakes because I am an indifferent jackass and did not repair them all for the same reason.

Getting them off the store and closing out my account is bothersome and I haven't done it yet, but I will. For now, The Tetrahedron and my first collection of short stories remain, as these texts and the books that contain them are relatively unblemished. Anyway, the blog is as important in its own way as what I have heretofore referred to as my serious, actual work. How did the blog come to be, and how has it become what it is?

*

Well, first, what it is might be the purest and most clownish form of staring into my own navel. A friend, not disparagingly, refers to it as my diary, and I have jokingly referred to myself as a professional diarist at some point. I guess it is both these things and I sort of am, but because I set myself very specific constraints and aims when I approach this text field, and have generated work that I find worthwhile thereby in a literary sense. The public nature of the act lends writing a high-wire act feeling which galvanizes me, and has driven me to produce far more involved and dense prose than I ever thought I would give away for free, more baring of myself as a person than I thought I would ever dare to make clear--and now it strikes me that this corpus, unwieldy and patchwork though it may be, is a valuable contribution to the "free" content available on internet. It pleases me to have given this away and to have it stand, free to all, and I am excited to continue.

Initially, as I said, it was something more on the order of a free sample cart, which would entice readers into paying for my stories and poems. I was out of work and holding onto a bunch of credit card debt accrued over the preceding three years in an effort to have some quality of life and treat my partner right, which was simply outside of my means. This situation cut through my distaste for commercialism and my horror of having to try and sell myself to other people. 

Longtime readers will remember that I used to write a lot more about the weather, about walking, about the sky. These things are still important to me, but they made their way so insistantly into the blog because I was walking five miles a day to work and five miles back constantly in an effort to accrue the capital to work off that debt--almost $6500--back to my dad, who had paid it off for me so as to rescue me from the interest. It took a long time and a lot of work. And in that time the blog, too, was a sort of life preserver I could cling to when I had lost my boat. How did I come to lose a boat? Hard thing to lose. It's basically you; I mean, we are our own boats on the sea of this existence. 

*

Not long after I broke off my first engagement, leading to the fraught, complicated, and misunderstood end of that relationship, I sank into despair and the beginnings of familiar drunken oblivion. The end of the engagement, the putting off of marriage, I had wanted, for many discrete and interconnected reasons--including guilt over that debt, which she knew nothing about, I suddenly realize. Hilarious.

Losing my partner, that I most certainly and firmly I did not want. I have, in other posts, said that I ended things, and that is a simplified version of things but not the truth. As we would both learn, you cannot always get what you want, not even when you were so close and everything seemed so great. Sometimes getting what you need means losing what you want, and vice versa. These are simple things every child alive experiences over and over, and we all spend our whole lives learning it again, because maturity may or may not be a myth, but the notion that it comes in stages with the crossing of abritrary thresholds or grows steadily with time is certainly bullshit. 

She was a great person, a brilliant person, wonderful, iconic, and I am certain she still is. I was a fool, broken and falsely mended. Brilliant, if you like--she thought so, and that must count for something--but any alleged greatness and wonderfulness I may have shown was the imperfect product of a vast effort on my part, predicated and founded on a lie. More on her and that another time.

*

A scant couple of months into my aforementioned despair, I found myself gravitating towards a particular customer at the place attached to the kitchen where I worked. Something about her; her extremely conservative, masculine clothing (this works for me--a lot of things work for me--though I am a being of fickle appetites, and what works for me in one person may not work in another), the way she carried herself and smiled and spoke to me, though calm and ordinary, unmistakably intimated extremely great sex. I began to feel that the time might be ripe for a passionate encounter, to remind me that life was not over and to get me back into some form of regular existence. At least, so I reasoned to myself, at that time. 

Also ever since I started having sex, I've had a problem with stopping for any length of time. Weird!

So we smoked some weed once when I got off work, this led to that and the other thing, and couple hangouts later we were fucking savagely on her apartment floor, eminent examples of the frenzied, thoughtless beasts we cerebral chimpanzees so easily and joyfully become in the throes of that seal-fresh-popped sex.

Our thing wasn't romantic at that stage, and much grief would have been saved if we had possessed the critical wherewithal to keep it that way. That is not how life tends to run its operations, I have found. 

Grief, it turns out, exists to be spent. Its veins are there in the bedrock of things, like seams of metal waiting to glimmer when the stone surrounding it gives way to the probing of human beings in pursuit of whatever they think it is they want, to be torn out of the earth, twisted into new shapes, and passed around as currency or beauty or utility, to be alloyed with other volatile, gleaming things pulled out of the darkness.

It's a fucking hell of a thing to be alive, is what I'm saying. I'd rather stick to bragging about how incredible she was at giving head, the only person who has ever brought me actual pleasure by playing with my balls at the same time; about how we fucked in her apartment and my house and in Alabama and Florida and the mountains of North Carolina and in the duplex we moved into after all that, but grief eclipses these simple joys. 

Anyhow. The sex was absolutely bangin'. Yes, she was, ultimately, a narcissist who made extensive use of me, and sensing this, I began using her to kill myself, to reduce myself down to something easily destructible. But while we were fucking, all of that was all right by me. Fuck drinking myself almost to homelessness, insanity, and death, I later thought. Prolonged intercourse with a narcissistic sex worker is the better slow suicide by far. Drinking is fun, but how could it ever compare to sex? Shit, most motherfuckers in this life learn to drink in hopes of getting to try sex, or get ahold of the fucker again.

*

She specialized in older men, particularly older men whose interest transcended the merely routine and sexual. She liked to be taken out, treated well, presented with gifts. She was a genius in many ways, a very masculine, Aspberger's genius, which permeated her personality and aesthetics. She was fascinated and passionate about illumination technology--flashlights. Dear reader, I know shit about flashlights and what the best flashlights can do that I would never have imagined previously. I have been in the workshop of a mad genius, whose technological breakthroughs in illumination have him in dialogue with national security agencies who wish to make use of his achievements. 

She also loved knives and was into independent blacksmiths before Forged in Fire, especially that dude Liam Hoffman, and she bought one of his knives made from like decomissioned battleship steel plating and a mahogany handle salvaged from the same ship. She was into a ton of shit--crazy high-grade herbal supplements from Sun Potion out in California, highly advanced nutrition, such as powdered vegetables from Dr. Cowan (read his book about how the heart is not a pump; pretty good) and other biodynamically farmed produce (she was, as some readers may have alread recognized, educated in the Rudolf Steiner system), blue glass, perfect German water bottles made of tempered glass--glass was a thing, basically--structured water filtered through no-plastic systems, no-plastic everything except these indestructible bags, metal containers to keep shit fresh without plastic, especially trail mixes composed primarily of sprouted almonds and Turkish mulberries (she was Turkish), ferments, traditional earthenware vessels, turned wooden bowls, dark instagram with like the crazy comedy snuff movies and devastating injury reels. 

Yeah, she was batshit out of her mind, but brilliant, with range most people lack. I wanted that crazy at the moment, and everything else she was offering. She took all the room I willingly gave her to drive, which meant I did all the driving. I served as her chauffer and aide-de-camp, essentially. Didn't have to work, she paid the minimum balance on my credit card for awhile (she had lots of money), and though I threw out the bulk of my possessions, we did hold on to all my books and shelves; in fair exchange, I cooked and cleaned and did most of the rest of the labor of living, drove her to whatever town she had an appointment in, be it profesional or optometric or to whatever store, and on whatever odyssey struck her fancy. It didn't matter. I was down. She kept me in weed, and it was on her indulgence that I began a three-year span of being high every waking minute. We ate basially exclusively amazing, clean, well-crafted foods. Most importantly it was great for awhile, running around to wherever every single day, never stopping to rest or think. She wasn't one to let the dust collect on her. We climbed mountains in North Carolina, checked out the Jim Beam factory in Tennessee, drove some of the Appalachian Trail roads,  jumped into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, watched the surf lap the docks on the Saginaw Bay, screwed around for awhile in Chicago. We drove back roads and country roads, rarely using any highways. I got to know a lot of our home state and a few of its towns in new and intimate ways, wandering around, surreptitiously consuming marijuana, praying to myself as I wandered.

*

Sure, the way she was at restaurants, with customer service in general, was a kind of nightmare. There were warning signs, which I happily ignored, in how she dealt with having a problem with her landlord early on, which led to us getting a place together. A maneuver, in hindsight, but also a characteristic element of her being-in-the-world--post office drama, server drama, doctor drama, this bitch motherfucker that asshole--all to create the frame that she had been cheated out of what was her right by the incompetence or aggression of a fundamentally innocent workforce. I mean, the fucking entitlement of a narcissist in service situations--it's aberrant, but keyed into the routine. It serves them well because it breaks the social norm so completely by using its mechanisms legitimately, so no one ever has time to adjust--you are pinned in their deft manipulation of what ought to be regarded as normal. 

She taught me finally how to deal with that, where to draw the indelible line that they can never cross. Draw it without passion, with a peacable smile, without letting yourself become drawn into the weeds or the particulars. Do this implacably, and they will recognize that they are known, and look for easier prey. I had a customer, long after after it was all over and I had done the first part of my processing, who hinted at me in our first interaction, which was very successful and normal-seeming--they always are, but it was something in the eyes, the smile, that spoke of having found a mark--that she was going to do the narcissist runaround.

The second time, the instant she became unreasonable, I drew the line. She didn't like that, and the change in her demeanor let me know that I had read and drawn correctly. She would have killed me right then, I wager, were it not for social consequences. And she never fucked with me again. She tried it with my staff, but I'd given out instructions to just come grab me or someone else who can hold their ground if I wasn't around. After a couple of instances coming up against the unscalable wall of unmoving politeness that I had built, she moved on to easier hunting grounds. 

Yeah, I cuss a lot and talk dirty here. But that's because we're close, dear reader. In meatspace, I prize the burnished chainmail of my courtesies very highly. It is rare that I use my real voice in the real world--one only deploys armaments when defenses have failed to repel, or when duty calls and there are no other voices to be heard.

*

Most every narcissist knows that they're fucked up, but the arguments they are wont to craft for the case of everyone else being the fucked up ones can be quite compelling, and of course are ironclad to the craftsperson. They're usually instinctively extremely intelligent, and usually intellectually savvy on top of that. They know they're built different, and are dangerous. But they're not monsters or anything. They balance it with generosity (they keep score on this generosity, but they cannot help that) and other ameliorative acts, they do their best to be as human as they can be, just like most other people. They bestow, engage, educate, try to share joy. But they are fundamentally gatherers and hoarders, owners, and their feelings of safety are found easily in the wielding of power, over strangers, conditions (particularly economic conditions), and loved ones. And their successful wielding of that power can create feelings of nausea and guilt, which they combat by doubling down or making themselves more unbearable than ever, until they are rebuffed, and then, relief, more guilt, remorse, and editing the past to make the future possible because ultimately you gotta be yourself.

It's not anything any more sinister than most other personality types. I can personally attest to theit humanity running as deep as any other human's. But the trauma that they cause is acute in its own special way, and since I possess this trauma, my thoughts on the matter tend to be somewhat more rigorous and label-determined than my wont.

What's fucked up about my personality type? I'm easy to get along with but almost impossible to know deeply, keep my own counsel basically always, and disappear into myself regularly. I vanish. I do not attach myself to the lives of my friends or even my brothers. I am the wandering fetus, and I am a different kind of narcissist. We all are. The mainstream application of the term as it stands now is in reference to high-ability manipulative grifters who specialize in capitalizing on vulnerabilities and structural inequalities, which makes them good at gaining and managing power over people. We've had quite a few presidents and hundreds of other government officials like this. People like this often pop up at or near the top, in world history. It's just how it is.

Explicative, huh?

*

Later on, when things started to dismember and disinitegrate--she took a trip to Turkey and when she came back, the shine had worn off me, apparently--and the question of my finances became pressing and front-facing, I made the books out of my collection of poems and the stories, which existed as a group and had been shortlisted for an award and publication but did not make the final cut. I created the blog and began typing into the blog, as I said on the advice of the kdp website, which stated that a blog would help attract readers. Whatever, I said. And you can read the blog from the beginning for an obscure yet revealing account of my days from there.

You can pretty much tell when it ceases to be a mere exercise and starts to become a way of surviving, albeit practically against my will. Did Factually Pointless save my life, a little bit? I'm going to say probably.

*

Pre-hiatus and Post-hiatus blog, the hiatus being the entire year 2020 for reasons I hardly need detail, are two different works, it seems to me, as 2020 changed me quite as completely as it changed the world. We all went through a lot then, or at any rate the vast majority of us here on this planet. Since 2021 the blog has been more difficult for me, my ability to engage with it more sporadic, but this is shaping to be a standout year for Factually Pointless, and I am excited to bring these ideas to you, dear reader.

Talk about navel-gazing! Let us hope for something a little more stimulating to the general public tomorrow, dear reader, though I know you don't mind reading my diary.

--JL

#364

Had a lot more thoughts about basketball and strategy overall. Forgot 'em all, but you might gettem anyway as it would appear that the desire to write more about sport and the sporters who sportem has resulted in the firm acceptance of

factually sportsmsanlike 2024

and they might flow back to me, depending. All of this is in the hands of God.

Damn. Welcome. Wow. Man, my mind is blown! Never in all this typing did I dream the blog would do this. I would have laughed at you had you suggested it, dear reader! Man, we gotta both strap in today.

*

When Muhammad Ali passed from this earthly plane, I bought a few of the magazines that I thought seemed irrestitible in the size of the moment. The LIFE magazine or however it would be appropriate to write that out was by far the best of my three selections in the checkout line at the Walgreen's next to the Autozone I was working at back then, more like a little book than a magazine. 

The best photograph among an impressive amount of great photographs as I remember it was of Ali in full profile at the bottom of a swimming pool, one foot far back behind the other, knucks up. The almost unbelievable beauty of Muhammad Ali is, I think, nowhere in greater evidence than this photograph. 

Wish I could say who took it, make proper citations, but I lost the magazine in one of the near-constant moves of my twenties. Sad loss. 

*

My wrestling coach, who coached me in both middle and high school and also happens to be the local sherriff, showed us a tape of the Rumble in the Jungle. At a wrestling camp I attended run by Steve Fraser--where I earned a t-shirt for completing the Grind, meaning I wrestled full-out, pausing only to switch opponents, for two hours solid, which I admit is one of my proudest lifetime accomplishments--I was shown it again. The analysis provided by both these coaches changed my life, and made Muhammad Ali an immortal in my eyes.

Not just the power. Not just the technique. The strats. The fucking strategies, baby. The bright shining line from before the thing even gets going to the win. When you have it all worked out and you know it can work. You see the shot clear and complete.

Seeing someone pull that shit off is one of the most satisfying spectacles in life. That art of war shit. One little pop, one little surpise to throw the opponent off balance. You anticipate where they go to regain their balance and if you're right, if you gauged your opponent accurately, you have them from there because the rhythm and the pace belong to you and they'll go where you take them.

You write a poem that dances in the air. Your feet trace an invisible mandala. You follow the bright shining line.

I would be remiss not to mention that the man lived an incredible, outstanding life in many other ways. I would argue that he is a touchstone in American history. 

*

Winning is cool. Let's face it. Winning can feel pretty good, and fulcrum of that is that it proves something, however ephemeral. It says something true about that moment.

Victory isn't something I really prize, though, because that moment is gone in a flash and I care as much or more about process than outcome. 

Now, they say that winning isn't everything, and that is actually bullshit. It is everything. We don't get into competition to fucking lose on purpose unless we're fucking with someone as a way to win on different level. There's nothing wrong with losing, because someone has to and everyone will. You might put up an undefeated professional record or whatnot, but at some point in your life you lost, and you learned from that loss; if nothing else, that the feeling of loss is unbearable in the extreme and that you must build your life on winning. Being as I personally identify very strongly with the Brilliant Loser competitive type, this is not the lesson I take from loss, but we are all different and it takes all kinds to make a worthy contest. 

And at some point, we like to see the proof of ourselves in the outcome. Just once at least. Even if you never taste it, though, that doesn't mean going for it was a waste of time or wasn't worth it.

They also say that it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. This is technically true but it is used incorrectly as another way to say that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, because what is actually important is the process of building character, of winning and losing gracefully. What is factual is that how you play the game indelibly affects how you win or lose, and that it is how you win or lose that you played the game. There is no actual durable distinction. Broken down further into the root truths: grace is indeed required, not only in victory and loss but in process. The tally of victories and losses is nothing more than a byproduct of a process whose aim is not to demarcate winners and losers but to engage human beings in a process of aspirational dynamism. Of growth, adaptation, creativity. Perhaps what they say is functional, but to me the fine points of the breakdown are essential.

It is not dominance that ought properly drive us in contest, or the fear of loss, but advancement, improvement, building bonds, inspiring ourselves and others to greater heights in all aspects of our lives. It is the example that we show by how we strive that is essential, not whether we win. Because victory could never satisfy us, and loss could never deter us. What we seek is transcendental.

We stay in the process. That process is both spiritual, laden with immanence, and grounded in our bodies, our brains and muscles and guts and bones. The point is that you put it all in the line.

The bright, clear, shining line.

*

More tomorrow! Man, I got plenty. This is crazy. For now though, the winds blow towards other waters.

--JL

#344

Keep coming back to it these days, so I might as well write it down. Elaborately optimize it. Trick it out, even. 

So, it can take place in a bus, since I know how to drive one, and why shouldn't I one day get my hands on one and cock it up to run on, I dunno, momentum. How's that for an optimized fantasy. My bus runs on its own momentum, and generates starting energy and impulse from running a charge sent from a switch connected to a bundle of 5-cell batteries powering electromagnets in the wheel wells and a mechanical man under the hood. It is this man who starts the engine, using a furnace that burns clean and runs on his own good cheer even as he does, and is never in short supply.

Ok. The bus runs. Silently. Maybe, sometimes, when everything and everyone is quiet, you might become aware of a nearly silent, humming grumble. And it plays this playlist I've been working on, and whatever else anybody wants to play no hassle, high quality sound. We'll call the bus Mighty Jake III.

All the highways and byways are empty of other vehicles. It's just our bus. The fields and towns and cities of the land remain populated, but only we drive. The transit is, as it were, sublimated. Otherwise it's all the same. Perhaps the empty highways are only an illusion, but we do not trouble ourselves about that, or about anything. The rest stops serve food as homemade and good as the diners, which use organic ingredients worked on by happy cooks well-paid and treated with dignity. Everywhere we go, we are treated with dignity, and treat everyone we meet with dignity. Everybody has enough money. Everybody's bills are paid. Nobody's got somebody back home who's laid up sick. Everything's tranquil.

MJIII's passenger area doesn't have to conform to safety standards or the rules of dimensional space, so usually it's sized more like a big van, everyone sitting comfortably, but not as comfortably as, say, in a given living room. The conditions and particular sensations need not be uncomfortable physically but adhered to; the body's sense that transit is happening, that everyone is closer together with fewer avenues of movement than they would be in most other contexts. But it's hammocks, it's beanbags, it's what you most need and the most you can get. When it's time for sleep, when some privacy is what's needed, the passenger area can be much bigger on the inside, TARDIS style. Need a shower? Not while the bus is moving, but whenever else, along with getting some laundry done. 

It begins with just me, rolling out in Jake all by myself. After I back the thing into the street, I open the door for Ezra and the cats, who live in a large, enriched section which travels with us without moving, MJIII's own extradimensional top deck. Ezra, looking forward to meeting everyone and introducing me to everyone, for that is the project--gathering the scattered handful of friends and family scattered through time and space whose faces we have not looked upon in for too long a spell, those whom we cherish no matter how long we must miss them. 

Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Miami, NYC, and that's just the big ones and that's just for starters. We have stops in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, and Japan, We have stops in Nairobi and Baghdad and Warsaw and Istanbul. 

After that it's just terribly personal invented dialogues concerning pieces of music and thoughts about life, an imaginary communion. Maybe someday I'll write it down, maybe as itself, maybe as something some characters are chewing on together. I'll try to make them beautiful, because in my mind, it is so beautiful, driving a pretend vehicle while I talk to absent friends and the dearly departed about what I really want them to hear, what I would give to relish in hearing them say.

*

Hey! Hop in. That all you're bringing? No, my dear, my darling--like our hearts, like our love, like our crazy-ass heads, this bug's bigger on the inside. 

--JL

#208

Hey, blogland! I took August off and it was fucking excellent for me. I read and bought so many books I’ll have to type up massive lists. Does that excite you? It makes blue steel of me, ladies and gentlemen. I could cut glass thinking about how things have gone with books this month.

Plus I quit smoking cigarettes again (been using the gum this time around), my computer appears to have destroyed all of my documents and I am tapping this out on my dad’s old iPad and do not know if I will be able to recover any of my projects in process (not the first time such a thing has befallen me, kind of a bummer but, forward, forward, always forward, not a glance backward!), and my heart is full of love. 

Also I work six days a week now with a scheduled double on the second day. It’s tiring but I know folks work way harder than that. I appear to be entering a time in life in which a sixty-hour workweek seems only right and proper. Feeling pretty strong, pretty lucky. There are far worse things than having plenty of work in front of you.

*

Yeah, this vacay was pretty necessary. Rediscovered some fundamentals in selfhood long-neglected and joyfully embraced. Remembered some stuff about myself. Sounds silly and simple, but it is frankly fucking amazing, fucking ridiculous what a person can forget, can let go of without realizing. 

More on that after I take two more weeks off! Bwahaaaaa! Tho long, thuckerth!

—JL

#172

Oh! Oh hey, blog. The blog I write, allegedly. Didn't see you there. Didn't see you there behind the tall, imposing cardboard cutout of a steaming cup of coffee, like a revenant from billboard concerning coffee from the middle nineteen-nineties.

Billboards aren't really about coffee anymore. They have transformed into glaring screens of swirling aggressively-colored and aesthetically sterile pontillisms, spewing the possessive white light that drains their content of any human warmth and shows only the mercenary rapine of trying to sell actual drive-up plastic surgery, as well as fifty other products, experiences, or notions (such as local wine, such as a safe bed free of parasites, such as a strip club near an airport, such as the services of a lawyer whose only drive seems to be to see you compensated beyond your wildest expectations [this is not a claim I have ever found very probable], such as the Word of Our Lord as it Relates to a Political Issue, such as an exceptional Mickey D's, such as the heroism involved in attaching yourself to the armed forces, such as the services of a powerful chiropractor*, such as a radio station you could listen to**) in an unresting loop, every hour of every year.

*

Not only has Album Week--fucking got-damned fricking Album Week 2019, worst decision of the month no question--put something of a damper on my workflow, my productivity overall has been a standstill due to life changes and emotional restructuring. Heavy work! Think of my spirit-body as a long and many-tiered bridge, with little construction gnomes all athwart it in their masses, busily shoring up the infrastructure and making plans to deal with new demands, with the fresh prognostics.

Each carries in their gnomy little hand a steaming cup of coffee.

*

On top of this, I had in fact written a high-effort post on the twelfth of this month--still a four-day lapse, one day longer than I like to take it. When I went to publish it everything went wrong, and I made the wrong decision in a dispassionate and unforced way, like very calmly I made the decision to click the wrong button, clicked again to confirm that I had intended to click the wrong button, and lost the whole post.

I had written at length about inevitability, and loss (losing records, discographies, whole music libraries, parts of yourself you didn't know you lost and parts of yourself that almost killed you in the very conscious losing), and accepting the grief of your fate with love and whatever joy you can. The irony was such that I could not be mad, could only confront the evidence of my own mind and hand and accept that I had written that post in order to destroy it. For the poetry of it? Who knows! I'm marinating in it.

Thought I dealt with it pretty well on the spot, chuckled at myself a bit, but it has been thirteen days and I haven't so much as approached a text field, so if by engaging that great irony and frustrating loss I intended to test myself I feel that I have fallen short. Got shook. I'll have to either change my generative procedures to more closely guard against loss or stick to my guns and continue to live on the edge of loss, grow into the individual that can pass that test whenever called upon.

These are the existential problems that life is all about. That, and hot beverages in the morning.

*

ALBUM WEEK
2019
CONTINUES
STILL

Ride the Lightning by Metallica is a truly great record, one of the best ever made by anybody anywhere. You can do what you like with this information.

*

There! There, blog. Let the healing begin.


--JL

*irl bonemancer.

**Catholic radio, Evangelical radio, some varietal of Protestant radio, some truly Christocult shit, the perennial local top forty station and the obligatory slot for some dude that calls himself "'Sick' Mike" whose voice sounds like Guy Fieri and Sam Kinison fucking each other hard after snorting up big rails of crank near some train tracks and when you look him up as a joke he's got a wikipedia page and is on the board of the local symphony orchestra and jazz society and is heavily involved in local charitable efforts and funding public programming and has a pretty insightful blog with like pictures of his kid sometimes so you feel this stupid connection with this goon who's got one of those smirks that looks as though someone pushed their pink chewing gum up and to the side as well as in when they stuck it on some surface. He seems like a good father to his daughter, and also like his skin was steam-cooked and has a good honest snap to it when it splits, revealing homogeneous ground meat. What music does he like? Hard to say; his CD collection is spread out throughout the (huge) house in various shelving units and his wall of records is very properly four walls, stuffed with vinyl, but all that plays on his station is nu-metal from the mid-aughts and stuff like Breaking Benjamin and Godsmack and Muse. His "opinion" segments and audience participation rituals are not things I like to discuss on Factually Pointless.***

***now I will have to write about that kind of stuff even though I would rather not. Not today, though.

#52

I'm one of those people who have left all their friends behind, or been left by them. With me it's a mixture, as it may be for most people. I wouldn't know.

What's there to say? I saved a few of their lives, shared whatever I had with all of them. Most did not share in kind. Some did.

With some, I dropped out of sight when I couldn't bear it any longer. Some dropped from mine, I assume for similar reasons. Now it's quiet, and I'm back where I started; they are sand on the wind, gone, scattered.

I know a few locations; Denver, Madison, Chicago, somewhere near Northampton, some city in New Jersey, somewhere in Thailand, Kyoto, Caracas, Rome, St. Petersburg, San Francisco, Havana, New York, Seattle, Paris. Some I forget, some I don't know. Some are here. Our paths don't cross. I stick to the shadows when I walk and work in the back of a building. I stay home.

Some people are dead to you, and you're dead to some people. No bodies have been buried, but this is death all the same. And if their eyes met mine one random chance? What would they see? What do dead eyes reflect off one another? 

Ghosting. So apt. All of us restless in our graves, all of us subject to running into someone we left for dead.


--JL

#47

The first hawk was gliding just a couple feet above the treetops, in a place where they reach at each other over a road going up a steep hill, so I was looking up at the bird as though standing in a sharply-cut gully with a river running through it. It was so rounded in the head in its flight, its wings so stubbed and its body so fluffed, tail spread wide and all so creamy white and pale underneath that I thought it was a Cooper's until it lazily banked to the right and the sun flared russet through the tail. 

*

More hawks...tomorrow! I gotta do it, sorry folks. I wrote the second parts of this post first, like a fool, and now it's gone and gotten late and I gotta work in the morning. Well, by all means, you have every right to leave in a huff, but, pray, if you can find it in your heart to forgive an idiotic man, read on. 

*

Funny. I have long believed myself a person who had seasoned into the kind of individual that is quick to absolve others of their trespasses against me. That I was good at forgiving, and have in fact been known for it. This last season of my life has cut deep enough that I find myself in the midst of a flood of rotten but still recognizable grudges floating up around me, and I find myself with new teeth to bite into their sodden, long-buried flesh.

Fuck be upon it! So I'm not as nice as I thought I'd forced myself to become, and lash out like any beast when wounded. Nothing for it but to savor the flavor and try to move on. Steps, time, etc. Every ten shifts, I walk a hundred miles. I have all the time I could possibly want.

*

It just struck me, as I listen to a particular song through headphones for the very first time, that I will never again so long as I may live hear this particular song through the speakers of my old car. I did not miss my old car till just now, when my heart was pierced as though by a thousand bitter spears. 

Life! Ha!

----------> BOOKS <------------


--JL